The Delaware Prosperity Partnership’s 18-member board – made up of elected officials and local business leaders – voted Wednesday to hire former Ashland Inc. executive John Riley as interim CEO during a closed-door meeting at Corporation Services Co.’s Greenville headquarters, according to multiple sources.

That means both the first-ever meeting of the partnership board that will help decide which companies get taxpayer-funded incentives and the vote to hire Riley took place before Carney publicly revealed whom he appointed to the board.

Ashland, of course, is a big corporate contributor to Tom Carper. I’ll betch’a that they have also helped to bankroll Carney. Riley was, wait for it, Ashland’s chief governmental lobbyist.

You couldn’t have drawn up a more blatant taxpayer rip-off if you tried.

Oh, and let’s finish this segment off with a quote from Greg Lavelle, one of the biggest phonies in Delaware:

I feel like we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t,” he said. “We get questioned for making a decision, but if we drug it out, we’d get questions about when we’re going to make a decision. I guess that’s life in the public sector.”

Greg Lavelle, who sponsored this monstrosity, portraying himself as victim. Some things never change.

The News Journal in July sent an open-records request asking for records of communication about public-private partnerships between Cohan, her deputy, or Delaware Department of Transportation division directors with the U.S. Department of Transportation or the White House.

No such records existed, according to DelDOT.

Perhaps that could be the new Delaware motto: “We leave no paper trail.”

I really wish someone would make the obvious link between Carney and the football head injury story. John Carney is a rather small guy, but he played quarterback throughout high school and college. How many head injuries did he receive?

I know this sounds like snark, but I’m serious. The news about Aaron Hernandez’s case of CTE means that he was suffering from symptoms even as he was playing. Why wouldn’t this explain Carney’s decline?

El Som: I set you up for that one. I don’t know if he was ever better than this, but so far his tenure has been marked by a level of tone-deafness that few Republicans even reach.

He’s certainly not performing like a pol whom, one of his backers assured me during the Carney/Markell primary, had spent eight years preparing to be governor. So far he’s making Ruth Ann Minner seem like a political mastermind by comparison.

In much the way the nation’s Republican Party has shown that, given power, it has no idea how to use it for the good of the people, Delaware’s Democratic Party has shown the same over the 25+ years it has controlled most or all of the state’s elected offices and legislative chambers.